One Nationwide License for Teacher Spouses?

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6 May 2015

If you're a military spouse whose chosen career field requires any kind of state-based license, you probably pay special attention to the push for what supporters called "license portability" -- the ability for you to use your license from one state in another.

Now one group is trying to make getting a teaching license easy for military spouses and civilians alike. The idea? Get states to opt-in to a nationwide license transfer standard.

Here's the deal: after you receive your teaching license through a process recommended by The Third Way, a self-described "moderate" D.C. based think tank, you could apply to transfer using something The Third Way calls the "Interstate Teaching Application." States would then evaluate your credentials and perhaps request more documentation. Moving across state lines under this process, they say, would be "fair and clear."

We know that the reciprocity process for any given license right now is well, sticky. Some states accept other states' licenses out right, others give you a grace period to use an out of state one while you work on their's. Others claim to make the process faster when reviewing a military spouses' license application. You can see the current status of state license reciprocity over here.

The Military.com story doesn't say how likely something like this is to go forward, but if I had to guess I'd say "not likely." Even though the think tank's plan does leave room for states to make their own decisions, getting 50 states full of lawmakers to agree to a nationwide standard of anything doesn't seem terribly likely. Throw in a basic love for state independence (after all, it is a founding principle of the whole America idea) and I see a major uphill battle for anything like this.